Edith Wharton took her title from this portrait of a cute little girl with chubby cheeks and bare toes in an oh-so-lovely woodland idyll. But as you know, The Age of Innocence ain't about a cute little girl in the woods.
But it is about innocence.
This novel looks into how innocence can have the appearance of purity and goodness, but it has its own special kind of cruelty as well. Wharton's title refers to a period that's already old news to her readership: 1870s New York. She's looking back fifty years.
From the post-World War I perspective of Wharton and her readers, the 1870s seemed like a simpler time when America was still relatively isolated from European political entanglements and when high society seemed impervious to change and maintained the traditions and customs it always had. Also, to a 20th-century audience, the fashion of The Age of Innocence looked super dated.
But Wharton didn’t just set The Age of Innocence in the past to say “Hey, check out these sweet frock-coats (what are frock-coats, anyhow?) and uber-extravagant meals." The novel tracks how the past influences the present. Wharton presents New York in the 1870s as a society that ruthlessly keeps out anything new and different. That’s what is meant by "innocence": the novel could have just as easily been titled The Age of Rejecting Change.
The term "innocence" is often associated with the super-conventional and priggish May Welland and her mother. "Ah no," Newland thinks as he realizes May's similarity to her mother, "he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!" (16.23). Newland, at least in his head, keeps it pretty real.
Ultimately, May triumphs when she prevents Newland and Ellen Olenska from running off together. By checking out May’s cold-hearted innocence, the novel raises questions about America's political isolationism. But this novel isn’t just an international relations fable; it's also just a super-sad love story with a super catty and biting narrative voice.